Amazon adds controversial Metacritic scores to video game listings

Affected titles go back as far as PS1 era, but film, music listings unaffected.

Metacritic scores can now be found in every Amazon video game listing. No word yet on whether films like Ishtar will receive the same treatment.

Amazon

Today, Amazon video game shoppers found a new piece of data tucked into the top-most information box on many of its listings: a Metacritic score. The criticism-aggregation site rates games, music, films, and more on a scale of 1-100 based on published reviews' values. That numerical ranking, which has been bemoaned by game fans and developers alike, can now be found on seemingly every applicable game's Amazon page.

Brief testing showed Metacritic scores appearing on games as old as Wipeout XL for the original PlayStation and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for the Nintendo 64, in addition to what appears to be every game released on consoles from the PlayStation 2 onward. The score only appears in the upper section of the listing, next to a star ranking based on Amazon user reviews, and mousing over the Metacritic number reveals an additional user rating from that site. This makes Amazon the second major online games retailer to post Metacritic scores in this manner, alongside Steam.

Ars Technica has distanced itself from Metacritic's rules, and as a result, our video game reviews are not included in Metacritic's scoring system. As former Ars gaming editor Ben Kuchera wrote in 2010, "You lose control over what your score means, because Metacritic has locked down a numerical score that tries to take non-numerical scoring systems into account. You lose control over when you can release your review, because companies give you ultimatums based on how Metacritic interprets that score."

After reports emerged in 2012 of game developers' pay being cut based on Metacritic scores, current Ars gaming editor Kyle Orland called for that practice to end. While he defended Metacritic's aggregation in part, he also noted, "Any critic will tell you that being forced to distill the complex and involved experience of playing a game into a single number is often a fool's errand, and that the difference between a game that gets a 7 out of 10 and one that gets an 8 is often incredibly slight."

Cursory searches of other media listings at Amazon revealed no other Metacritic association, with the exception of Amazon Instant Video listings which include IMDB user rankings. We have reached out to Amazon with questions about the change in its games listings and will update this article if we hear a response.